Tower and Stockade and Word and Match

Tali Tamir, Art curator

In the beginning of this series was the text: written in French, printed in a 1970 French daily; an interview with Mrs. Bier who talked about the gypsies, comparing them to the Jews: “The gypsies, said Mrs. Bier calmly, are like the Jews; they do business, monkey business, trade… but they aren’t fit for real work…” No more than the usual smack of racism which, this time, in its specific formulation, at this late timing, seared the consciousness of Evyatar Stern – an Israeli artist living in Paris at the time – leaving a deep scar. This text would be buried under every work he was to execute in the subsequent years, and would serve as a white ground, the necessary foundation for an artwork. A ’90s banality of racism, this text would emerge from underneath layers of wax, book pages, artificial lawns and constructions of beheaded matches populating his works.

Stern was prone to take the blow: throughout his 12 years at the heart of Europe, he delved into the Holocaust, dredging up the historical consciousness, irritating its nerve-endings. In an early 1980s series of works which was begun in Israel and continued in Paris, he constructed a crematorium as a point of departure for his stay there, and as a link to his childhood home, the home of parents who had undergone the Holocaust and who kept it a dark secret to themselves. The experience of his parents was also a central one in the consciousness of the “second generation”. More than growing up with the horror itself, he was raised in the shadow of the silence enshrouding it, in the shadow of the desperate, and the responsibility to direct the gaze of the post-trauma children toward a better future. And the more the parents emphasized the future, so the shadow of the past opened and grew behind their backs, and the presence of the secret intensified. Evyatar Stern’s oeuvre deals with the covert diffusion – an invisible process of conducting materials from the deeply-buried strata to the surface. He thus enacts a process which ostensibly possesses a constructive potential, yet turns out to be unstable and shaky, on the verge of disintegration.

The visible plane of the works (laid on the wax layers covering the buried text), deals entirely with the recent, short history of the Zionist-Israeli ethos. A stratified, albeit detached, link is made between a European subconscious which persistently pounds and kicks below the surface, and the tremendous effort of Zionist culture to obscure, repress and conceal its existence and residues.

The visual sources sustaining Stern’s work are books unfolding the history of the yishuv, issues of Dvar Hashavua and Bamachane; materials which have had a considerable part in modeling the Israeli collective memory and determining its positive image for the future generation: muscle-bound pioneers, male and female soldiers in IDF uniform, erected buildings, an infrastructure of pipes, portraits of the yishuv leaders, and heroic photographs of the Tower and Stockade settlements. Stern employs a private, practically random, photograph archive, which is neither categorized nor classified, yet preserves the effort of structuring Zionist consciousness. It is not an alternative archive which rejects the “mainstream narrative”, constantly pursuing the story of the “other”, in the sense discussed by Foucault when coining the term “Archaeology of Knowledge”, defining it as a multiplicity of facts devoid of a necessary inner affinity, and as a movement between mutations, transformations and ruptures. Despite the stratified framework, which endeavors to “dig in”, Stern’s archival materials are familiar, perhaps too familiar, almost iconic, in Israeli culture; he scatters them within his field, which grows on latent racist darkness. Stern deconstructs the unity of “official state photography” à la Dvar Hashavua and Bamachane, interfering with its ordered visibility. He does not operate outside the familiar knowledge, but rather within it and therefrom; and there, in the “archive cellars”, to borrow Gideon Ofrat’s term, he traces the fragments of the mainstream narrative.

The historical photographs, all in black-and-white, serve Stern as a base for the works’ third and top layer, which transcends into the three-dimensional realm: surfaces of artificial green grass and constructions made of matches. Apparently the most concrete in relation to the other two, this plane embodies – by its very essence, and often in its “architecture” – the inner spiral typifying the course of time and consciousness, which gradually implode, returning to the past on a route of accelerated disintegration. Stern’s match towers are like a miniaturized paraphrase of the aspiration for power and control underlying the Tower and Stockade perception; an important match-system introducing the concept of the transient and temporal alongside moments of great naivety; moments of dreaming about sea and boats, houses and sun, made of matches whose heads – their vitality and burning potential – had been truncated and circumcised.

Though he is not the first to declare the gradual disintegration of the Zionist ethos, Stern’s work is unique in the troubling, disconcerting echo of very contemporary racist thought as a base for his acts of plunging into the memory books of Israeli culture. While constructing this dialogue between the literary parts and the plastic parts, affinities are created, stemming from “a place of both persecutor and persecuted, from the black bits and immense semi-dark chasms of the second generation.” This unsettling link forces you to take a stand toward your own history, compelling you to re-examine the nature of the unconscious interdependence between the layers of historical memory. Through the dialogical confrontation he generates between power and weakness, between fore-documenting photographs and match towers imbued with child-like innocence on the verge of disintegration, Stern poses questions concerning the nature of power built on the Holocaust trauma: what part of it was built on an illusion of optimism, as a backdrop of protective statehood; what part of it is not immune to the deep permeation of horror; how much of it represses the fascism option as one which lies within it, and how much of it is an inescapable hidden potential which attacks from any side – from that of the persecutor, and in a different situation, from that of the persecuted.